The mobsters and terrorists next door

Did you offer Valachi protection first?

Shur: There wasn't a witness protection program at the time. He simply came in and offered up this information. We had, for the first time, a living being who was going to tell us what the Mafia's really like. The first thing he tells us is that it's not called the Mafia, it's called La Cosa Nostra ["our thing"]. That's the first time we hear the name.

Do you believe that WITSEC broke omertà? Do you think it sent irreversible ripples throughout the Mafia community?

Shur: Oh yeah. WITSEC and wiretapping, two major things in the investigative phase. You're listening in on their telephones, so they go out in the street to talk. They're talking to a person and whispering in his ear and that person turns out to be our witness that's coming into the program the next day. Their communications were terribly disrupted; it caused distrust in the organization. Not only did we get tens of thousands of convictions, but we caused an organization to be quite upset. How do you deal with each other? Anyone could turn you in tomorrow.

Earley: Nobody trusted anyone after that.

What was surprising to me, though -- and you mentioned that they often said they'd "fallen out of favor with their family" -- was that they were just as eager to gain acceptance from the police.

Shur: Yes, they had to belong to an organization. Suddenly, they would start to say "We're going to convict." It was an "I need to be attached" and "I need approval" kind of thing. As Joe Valachi kept saying to me: "Did I do all right, Gerry?"

After all of your experiences with these men, do you have a more complex understanding of them? Or do you mostly feel that they're cold, brutal killers?

Shur: Well, those who kill are killers. But I don't believe in saying they're bad people; I believe that people do bad things. Once you say they are bad people, you are then saying that there is nothing I can do to rehabilitate or change them. If you say they're people who do bad things, then perhaps I can alter some of that behavior.

Why do you think that WITSEC is a rehabilitation program?

Shur: We do things that you don't get when you come out of prison. When you come out of prison, you get a bus ticket out of town and a little assistance in finding work. When we relocate a witness, we have a witness security inspector who's assigned to take care of the family's needs. The witness is helped getting a job, finding a place to live, he gets a check until he finds a job. If he has a health problem, he has a person he calls who comes over. We give him psychological aid. They're getting very intense social worker help -- from someone who's also trained to carry a gun and arrest people.

Earley: And there's also a very good reason for this. If they become exposed publicly, they'll be killed. So there's a good incentive to stay hidden and make the program work.

But what about when someone's demands become too much? You talk about how you need to keep these people happy, and that seems like a daunting task.

Shur: When the guy says to you, "If you don't send me to France, I'm not going to testify," or says to you, "I'm not going to have black deputies around me. If you put black deputies around me, I'm not going to testify" or "If you don't give me this number of thousand dollars a month ..." I tell them, "Hey, this is what you get."

Earley: How about the guy and his girlfriend?

Are you talking about the guy who demanded penis surgery because he wasn't able to have sex otherwise?

Shur: Well, that's one. A psychiatrist came forward and said that the guy absolutely needed that surgery or he'd commit suicide. The object was to have the people treated, at least medically, as they would have been at home. No plastic surgery like in the movies.

Earley: Of course, there were the breast implants for Aladena "Jimmy the Weasel" Fratianno's wife. [Fratianno was known as the "Mafia's executioner on the West Coast" and contacted the FBI in 1977 after being indicted for murder and having a hit put out on him by Los Angeles crime boss Dominic Brooklier.] And there's the case where a guy asked Gerry to move his girlfriend but not his wife.

Oh, boy. It's amazing -- in many cases, you did have to relocate girlfriends and wives.

Shur: He knew in his heart that [his wife] would be killed. So the object was to have me become the substitute for his divorce court. I wasn't about to do that.

Let me go to something that's more current. The first Middle Eastern people I dealt with, and some Israeli prisoners that we've had, were used to bargaining. So if you said to them, "We'll give you $600 a month to live on," they would always start up high: "Well, I want $1,800." I had a sense of being in a bazaar at times. One person who offered to testify in a terrorist case -- one that I can't identify -- told me that he'd testify if I gave him a million dollars cash. No way.

Since we're talking about international terrorists, what kind of complications arose from trying to deal with them?

Shur: Cultural differences. We had another Middle Easterner who wanted his wife to be subservient. He didn't want her going to college, he didn't want her driving a car, he didn't want her wearing Western clothing. She was privately telling us that she wanted to do all these things. Do you sneak her out and let her go to college? We arranged for a counselor to meet with both of them and talk it through.

Next Page: Al-Qaida members in WITSEC

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